DVD, Blu-ray playback won’t be built in to Windows 8

Microsoft has already said that Media Center won’t be included with Windows 8 when it launches later this year. The software that lets you record television and provide advanced music and video management will be an add-on you’ll pay extra for if you need it.

Now comes word that Windows 8 will not include built-in support for optical media playback. That means you won’t be able to play DVDs and Blu-ray discs in the default Win8 configuration. You’ll either have to buy the Media Center package, or use third-party software.

Given the changing landscape, the cost of decoder licensing, and the importance of a straight forward edition plan, we’ve decided to make Windows Media Center available to Windows 8 customers via the Add Features to Windows 8 control panel (formerly known as Windows Anytime Upgrade). This ensures that customers who are interested in Media Center have a convenient way to get it.Windows MediaPlayer will continue to be available in all editions, but without DVD playback support. For optical discs playback on new Windows 8 devices, we are going to rely on the many quality solutions on the market, which provide great experiences for both DVD and Blu-ray.

The reason, of course, is that optical media playback is in decline, and Microsoft sees the writing on the wall. Because of that decline, Microsoft no longer feels that the cost of licensing decoders for optical media across all copies of Windows is justified.

In the process of building a robust platform, we’ve also evaluated which in-box media playback experiences we want to provide. The media landscape has changed quite significantly since the release of Windows 7. Our telemetry data and user research shows us that the vast majority of video consumption on the PC and other mobile devices is coming from online sources such as YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, or any of the other myriad of online and downloadable video services available. In fact, consumption of movies online in the United States will surpass physical video in 2012, according to this recent IHS Screen Digest research.

On the PC, these online sources are growing much faster than DVD & broadcast TV consumption, which are in sharp decline (no matter how you measure—unique users, minutes, percentage of sources, etc.). Globally, DVD sales have declined significantly year over year and Blu-ray on PCs is losing momentum as well. Watching broadcast TV on PCs, while incredibly important for some of you, has also declined steadily. These traditional media playback scenarios, optical media and broadcast TV, require a specialized set of decoders (and hardware) that cost a significant amount in royalties. With these decoders built into most Windows 7 editions, the industry has faced those costs broadly, regardless of whether or not a given device includes an optical drive or TV tuner.

Indeed, most use of DVD and Blu-ray discs is in players connected to HDTVs, so financially this makes a sense for Microsoft. And these codecs can be expensive. The late Steve Jobs famously said the reason why the Macintosh platform doesn’t support Blu-ray is that its licensing terms are“a bag of hurt”.

Still, for those who use their PCs to watch movies and TV on optical discs, it makes the process of doing so a bit more complicated.

Microsoft doesn’t say how much it’s going to charge for Media Center, but it probably won’t be much. In a comment on the blog post, Windows chief Steve Sinofsky says Microsoft is shooting for “single digit dollars”. And computer makers will have the option of bundling it on desktop and notebook PCs and passing on the cost in the overall price of the hardware. I suspect that, on nearly every machine sold as being suited for multimedia, Media Center will be present. If not, it will be downloadable from within Windows itself.